12.13.2011

Late last night the developers at CraftBukkit made an announcement that had Minecraft administrators everywhere jumping for joy: CraftBukkit 1.0 is now a recommended build!

For those of you who haven't heard about Minecraft (where have you been?) or who have heard of it but don't know what it's about, I will attempt to summarize:

Minecraft is a sandbox game about harvesting blocks or MINEing them and then CRAFTing those blocks into whatever the player desires. Players can build structures, working circuits, boats, and weaponry as well as gain levels, enchant weapons, fight a dragon and pretty much whatever they can think up. The world that the player characters live in is extensive - rumored to cover five times that of our own earth's surface. It has biomes, changing weather, day/night progression, caves, oceans and plant life. It can be played as a single-player or a multi-player game and offers a couple of different game modes that an administrator can choose based on what he/she desires out of the server's community.

CraftBukkit is an interface for Minecraft mods. What that means is that it offers a stable platform with which other independent developers can build on. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of mods that have been developed for CraftBukkit that do things like provide an economy system or add skills and faction to the game.

Until now, the latest version of Minecraft (version 1.0.1) was not compatible with CraftBukkit due to changes in the code made by Notch. This meant that many Minecraft server administrators simply ran an older version of Minecraft (beta 1.8) which meant they missed out on improvements that Notch had made to the game or upgraded but dropped CraftBukkit until a recommended build came out.

I am a Minecraft server administrator myself and we have rolled the CraftBukkit recommended build out to our server today! I can't wait to see all of the cool mods out there that will make our server better.